A more modern manual page viewer for our terminals

Version 1.5.0 -- see what's new

• Generic build instructions (works for most Linux distros)
• O/S specific instructions
• Manual
• Troubleshooting
• Packages
• Configuration and themes
• Contributing

Unix manual pages are lovely. They are concise, well-written, complete, and downright useful. However, the standard way of accessing them from the command-line hasn't changed since the early days.

Qman aims to change that. It's a modern, full-featured manual page viewer featuring hyperlinks, web browser like navigation, a table of contents for each page, incremental search, on-line help, and more. It also strives to be fast and tiny, so that it can be used everywhere. For this reason, it's been written in plain C and has only minimal dependencies.

• Index page that displays all manual pages available on the system, sorted alphabetically and organised by section
• Pages for apropos and whatis results
• Hyperlinks to other manual pages
• Hyperlinks for URLs and email addresses
• Hyperlinks to files or directories in the local filesystem
• In-page hyperlinks
• A table of contents for each manual page
• Incremental search for manual pages
• Incremental free page text search
• Command-line options similar to those of man (most importantly, -k and -f)
• Keyboard mappings similar to those of less
• Mouse support
• Navigation history
• On-line help
• Fully configurable using INI-style config files
• Manual page

All basic functionality has been completed. The software has been in use since late 2023 and is considered stable. Bugs, of course, still happen. If you think you have found one, please open an issue.

Version 1.5.0 introduces the following:

• Support for several different manual page systems. Historically Qman only supported mandb, but this is no longer the case. The program now supports the following manual page systems:
  • mandb - most Linux distributions
  • mandoc - Void Linux, Haiku, others?
  • freebsd - FreeBSD
  • darwin - macOS
• Hyperlinks to files or directories in the local filesystem (new config option viewer_path can be used to specify the program for opening them)
• New [capabilities] config file section enables users to disable several non- core program features
• Three new themes:
  • adwaita, designed to match the colors of dark Adwaita desktops
  • adwaita-light, designed to match the colors of light Adwaita desktops
  • modernity-light, a generic light theme to complement modernity
• Re-organized and extended documentation
• Improved error messages, especially when it comes to errors caused by misconfiguration or a missing manual pages database
• Miscellaneous other bug fixes and minor features

💡 Note

Users using custom config files may need to update them after a new release. For more information, please refer to Qman's manual page and the documentation in config/README.md.

In version 1.5.0, config options sections_on_top, hyphenate and justify have been moved to section [capabilities].

Index page:

Opening a manual page using a pop-up:

Using the table of contents:

Searching incrementally:

Performing apropos:

Online help: